The Science Guy Grows Up

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The Science Guy Grows Up

The Andy Kaufman of the science world is back. Bill Nye, the rubber-faced engineer whose television series for kids was equal parts lesson and stand-up comedy, returns to the small screen April 3. Whereas Bill Nye the Science Guy introduced elementary scientific concepts to elementary school viewers, The Eyes of Nye takes on hard-hitting adult topics like addiction, cloning, and climate change. The show airs on local public television stations (www.eyesofnye.org). But Nye's more serious avocation hasn't compromised his zany edge. When Wired caught up with him, the topics foremost in his mind were bugs, PB&J, and sex.

WIRED: What sparked your interest in science in the first place?NYE: When I was about 3, I would watch bees come and go from these azalea bushes. They'd load up their baskets with pollen, and I'd swear I saw the same individuals come back. I thought, "That is unbelievable! How do they find their way?" A few years later, I read a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" in the paper that said, "According to aerodynamic theory, bees cannot fly." Even then, I remember thinking to myself, "That's not a very good theory. What's really going on here?"

Why return to television?My goal in doing this show is to change the world - not so much that everyone starts driving on the left side of the road, say, but I want to get people thinking about the processes behind science and how they give you insight into everything around you.

What's one topic we all need to worry about?As a kid at the World's Fair in 1965, I missed seeing the big global population clock roll over from 2,999,999,999 to 3 billion - I was really disappointed. Now we're at more than 6ébillion. Humans lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, barely getting to one and a half billion, and within the next century, we're projected to go to 9 billion. It's going to be a mess for somebody.

In the "Evolution of Sex" episode, you say the main function of sex is to keep germs and parasites at bay. What's the deal with that?That's the best theory going right now. If you were talking to the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, you'd have to run constantly to keep up, because the whole world moves whenever she takes a step. That's what life is like. You have to keep running on the treadmill of evolution or you fall off. The germs are mutating like a son of a gun, but with sex you can derive these crazy new gene combos that lock them out. Beat that!

Science and comedy seem like strange bedfellows. How do you make serious science funny?How can you not make it funny? Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does. There's all this PB&J: passion, beauty, and joy. But there's also the futility of the whole thing. We're just humans on this dying planet, and it doesn't much matter what we do. We're always setting up expectations, whether scientific or otherwise, and failing to meet them. That creates comedic tension. The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.